Advertising Will Take Us to the Mountaintop

Now more than ever, America is truly a cultural melting pot (or at least a cauldron). In less than 30 years, whites will lose their majority, and we will be a nation composed solely of minorities. How will America cope? By marketing, of course.

Although we are a nation founded on the principles of white supremacy, imperialism, and exploitation of minorities at home and abroad, we shall not turn to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission nor a spiritual leader to pave the way for our multicultural future. That shit is un-American. The mechanism that we will use to come together as one is sheer capitalistic force, in the form of ever-more-refined advertising techniques.

We will not accept our multiracial future due to a love of mankind. We will embrace it because all these people are the new customer base.

For evidence of this I invite you to peruse Ad Age's multicultural issue this week, chock full of discussion of how to best sell the detritus produced by corporations to a more diverse audience than ever before. This, truly, is as close as America is able to come to the post-racial dream: a world in which we strive to understand and appreciate other races not for any inherent reasons of brotherhood, but so that we can sell to them.

"Our growth depends on catering to the Latina," Lyris Leos, director-multicultural marketing at J.C. Penney, told Ad Age in June. Until then, she said, the chain had "never overtly stated and assertively made the claim that the Latina is our brand muse."